There are several forms of reincarnation in many Hindu religions. In Buddhism too, a person is born and reborn dozens of times until he learns to master his emotions and desires. Life is believed to be for the purpose of overcoming the desires of the body. Through a series of births and deaths a person finally achieves Nirvana, when the cycle of births and deaths ends, and one is born no more. Nirvana is supposed to be a state of bliss where one has reached the state beyond birth and death. In some Hindu religions, one can be reborn as an animal, an insect, a worm... etc. One Indian saint told his disciples that he would come as a rat in the next life. There is an Indian temple in his honor where they still continue to feed and protect rats of the neighborhood daily for fear that one of them might be the reincarnation of that saint. There is another Hindu god, Hanuman, who was incarnated as a monkey in his last appearance. They have a temple for him too, where they feed monkeys daily, protect and care for them in the environs of the temple.

That is a good thing I guess -- it encourages people to treat other animals with respect!

Fatalism, or karma, does not tell people to live life to the fullest. It simply states one must accept ones fate, unquestioningly, and live it. If one accepted this philosophy one would have to say: \"If I have already lived this same life many times before, and there is nothing for me to change, why talk to me about living life to the fullest? If my previous life was lived to the fullest, I will live it to the fullest again this time. If I have not done so in previous lives, then there is nothing I can do about it now. I am totally powerless.\" This is the logical result of Eternal Recurrence, or what we might correctly rename as: The Doctrine of Despair, which reduces human life to that of a marionette or puppet, where the strings are forever held in the hands of fate, creating a total paralysis in the mind of the individual and society. So, from either the scientific, or the moral and ethical standpoint, this is a philosophy of doom, and there is nothing much going for this doctrine. It is a totally bankrupt worldview.

If one wants to teach Eternal Recurrence as a religion, fine. We will not object to that. But to present this as a serious philosophy is simply unacceptable. It does not surprise us that Nietzsche advocated this doctrine. He did not have much of mathematics or scientific training, which has proved to be his Achilles\' heel. As for the ethical view of this philosophy, Nietzsche might not have known what poverty and squalor this fatalistic religion had brought to India. Otherwise, we don\'t believe he would advocate such an evil system to be introduced into European thinking.

Spinoza maintained that there is no mind absolute or free will, but the mind is determined for willing this or that by a cause which is determined in its turn by another cause, and this one again by another, and so on to infinity. A body in motion or at rest must be determined for motion or rest by some other body, which, likewise, was determined for motion or rest by some other body, and this by a third and so on to infinity.

Potatoes can disintegrate but there is no way for the smashed up pieces of potato to come together by themselves and get reconstructed into the original potatoes with skin and all, no matter how long eternity lasts. And if these two plain and simple potatoes cannot come back into their original shape by sheer coincidence, or permutation of matter, how would it be possible for two airplanes that crash to get reconstructed into their original shape by sheer permutation of matter? Eternal Recurrence is even worse, in that it tells us not only airplanes, but human beings too, and elephants, and cows, serpents, spiders, and eagles… get reconstructed not once, but over, and over again by sheer permutation of matter.

OMG, this guy is a genuine ass! It's not strange by any means, though, engineer types think strictly in linear terms and totally lack any sort of imagination.

As for the ethical view of this philosophy, Nietzsche might not have known what poverty and squalor this fatalistic religion had brought to India. Otherwise, we do not believe he would advocate such an evil system to be introduced into European thinking. If, however, he knew full well of the paralyzing social effect of this doctrine in India, and still advocated it, then this would further prove Nietzsche s evil genius. Since his whole philosophy was centered on weaving the myth of the Superman and the Super race, to rule over the earth, was he perhaps paving the way and preparing a moral code for the rest of us, the chandala, to accept and live by -- Eternal Recurrence? This could perhaps, explain why he considered it as a very crucial part of his philosophy? In that case, he meant it to serve as the final nail that would hold down the lid of the coffin he created. History, however, bears witness to the fact that it was the very Superman and the Super race Nietzsche created with the myth of his philosophy that were buried in, and nailed in that very coffin -- Hitler and his followers.

Karma and fatalism means you have to discover what Fate has reserved for you -- it means living your life as it was meant for you. If you feel deep down yourself you are selected to be a chandala, then live as a chandala. If you feel you were meant to be a master, then live your life as a master! You decide it for yourself!

Though Nietzsche briefly touches on "eternal recurrence" a few more times in other works, the quotes given above are the most fundamental, and stand out like two supporting pillars of the doctrine. Right off the bat one can see from these quotes, "eternal recurrence" is a thread woven out of thin air, a simple fantasy presented without any argument. It is a tale, a story told as part of the narrative of that old oracle, Zarathustra, along with his eagle, serpent, spider and other animals. This narrative, which at its very best, is only a fabrication of the writer's imagination, does not amount to a reasoned argument in support of a theory or doctrine. In the narrative, "eternal recurrence" is just a hypothesis put forward by the author. None of the exhaustive arguments, axioms, theorems, syllogisms, etc., required to prove or support a "philosophical" theory, are ever given either here, or any other works of Nietzsche. Eternal Recurrence is just an idea, a concept, thrown at us much like a ghost story. There are those, who, like little children, believe any ghost story at face value. But there are also some of us who demand a more substantive and objective proof before we can accept an idea.

The strongest of the "pseudoscientific" arguments, put forward to support this doctrine by the followers of Neitzsche, is a mixture of statistical mathematics, physics and astrophysics. It goes something like this: -- "...Time is infinite, an endless eternity, but since space and matter in the universe are finite, limited, all the matter in the universe, therefore, can be combined, arranged and rearranged in a finite number of permutations. Given the eternity of time, these permutations must therefore, repeat themselves over and over again, and must already have repeated themselves many, many times in the eternal past. And they will also continue to repeat themselves going in circles in the eternity of the future." Bingo! Therefore, they say: eternal recurrence is a scientific fact!

You are obviously someone who thinks "science" is the solution to the problem of humanity. The way one sees and interprets the events in one's life determines how one responds to them -- that is, how one behaves. Each person dwells in a subjective world, and even the so-called objective world of the scientist is a product of subjective perceptions, purposes, and choices. Because no one else, no matter how hard he tries, can completely assume another person's "internal frame of reference," the person himself has the greatest potential for awareness of what reality is for him. In other words, each person potentially is the world's best expert on himself and has the best information about himself. What drives a person to live, interact with the environment, his "motivation" if you will, is the overall characteristic of simply being alive. No special concepts are required to understand why people are motivated and active: every person is motivated for no other reason that he is alive. The individual is what he does and comes to know his nature by seeing what he is doing. There is no human nature -- man simply is, and he is nothing else but what he makes of himself.

The thought of eternal recurrence was addressed by Nietzsche; he never spoke about the reality of "eternal recurrence" itself, but about the thought of eternal recurrence. Nietzsche conceived of the idea as a simple "hypothesis", which, like the idea of Hell in Christianity, did not need to be true in order to have real effects. However, he does discuss the possibility of eternal recurrence as cosmological truth, although in essence the concept is treated as the ultimate method of affirmation in the course of overcoming nihilism.

Nietzsche's concept of eternal recurrence, for instance, was addressed by Schopenhauer. It is a purely physical concept, involving no "reincarnation," but the return of beings in the same bodies. Time is viewed as being not linear but cyclical. By the way, Eternal Recurrence is a concept which posits that the universe has been recurring, and will continue to recur in the exact same self-similar form an incomprehensible and unfathomable number of times. The concept has roots in ancient Egypt, and was subsequently taken up by the Pythagoreans and Stoics. With the decline of antiquity and the spread of Christianity, the concept fell into disuse, though Friedrich Nietzsche briefly resurrected it. The basic premise is that the universe is limited in extent and contains a finite amount of matter, while time is viewed as being infinite. The universe has no starting or ending state, while the matter comprising it is constantly changing its state. The number of possible changes is finite, and so sooner or later the same state will recur.

Nietzsche never hid the fact that he was deeply influenced by Schopenhauer and his non-rational philosophy of will expressed in The World as Will and Idea after he transferred to University of Leipzig. However, by nature Nietzsche was not rational, but was, from the beginning of philosophical study, deeply attracted to non-rational elements of reality, which in Schopenhauer's philosophy was the concept of will.

[...] It was said of Plato that he "never touched a woman," and the same is probably true of Pascal, Kant, Kierkegaard, Mill, Carlyle, Thoreau and Nietzsche. [...]

This simply tells me they were all fagz.

Nietzsche was not a fag. It was actually Wagner who, after Nietzsche and Wagner split, conducted a relentless and vindictive campaign against Nietzsche on the grounds that he was homosexual. Unless you think Niezsche should have been gay just because he wrote "The Gay Science" (it's "Die Froeliche Wissenschaft" in German btw you'd have to take into account the fact that when Nietzsche first met Richard Wagner in 1869, the magisterial composer was more than twice the age of the fledgling philologist. Wagner had also just been banished from the royal court of Bavaria for his adulterous affair with Cosima von Bülow. Although the friendship between the two men began rather well, it would famously degenerate into a bitter intellectual and emotional feud. The thing is that Wagner was a manipulative jerk and that Nietzsche and Cosima, who both suffered miserably in youth, were psychologically vulnerable to Wagner's seductive but emotionally abusive behavior. He would "advise," for example, in a letter to an homosexual friend to "try to cut down a little, on the pederasty"...

You are obviously someone who thinks "science" is the solution to the problem of humanity. The way one sees and interprets the events in one's life determines how one responds to them -- that is, how one behaves. Each person dwells in a subjective world, and even the so-called objective world of the scientist is a product of subjective perceptions, purposes, and choices. Because no one else, no matter how hard he tries, can completely assume another person's "internal frame of reference," the person himself has the greatest potential for awareness of what reality is for him. In other words, each person potentially is the world's best expert on himself and has the best information about himself. What drives a person to live, interact with the environment, his "motivation" if you will, is the overall characteristic of simply being alive. No special concepts are required to understand why people are motivated and active: every person is motivated for no other reason that he is alive. The individual is what he does and comes to know his nature by seeing what he is doing. There is no human nature -- man simply is, and he is nothing else but what he makes of himself.

This doesn't sound like one's awful caring about being moral and the like... which appears to be in line with the theory of karma and its cousins.